


All Hours Are the Same

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Outpost Destruction, References to Depression, non canonical outcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 00:06:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10502298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: vetra's a fixer.  she can't fix this.  a bit of h/c for dreamer.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreamerInSilico](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/gifts).



Six hours after they went planetside to confirm the loss of Kadara Outpost, Vetra’s inbox pinged with a message from an unusual source.   
    
  
      _To: Vetra Nyx_   
      From: SAM   
  
_I intercepted the attached document before it reached its intended recipient.  Though this message has the potential to be critically damaging to the Andromeda Initiative as a whole, Ryder’s wellbeing is my primary concern.  I believe it to be yours as well.  I trust you to act on this knowledge with that in mind._  
  
  
“Shit,” whispered Vetra.   
  
She bypassed several tough encryptions, no doubt designed specifically for her, before she finally cracked open SAM’s attachment.  Then she read it, three times.   
  
“Shit.”     
  
Vetra bolted from the armory.   
  
Once locked behind the door to Ryder’s quarters, though, she couldn’t bring herself to have the talk, to ask about what she’d read.  Neither of them had developed a confrontational gene.  In the middle of the room, in the middle of a ripening tangle of sheets, were failure and sorrow packed into a battered container too fragile for the radiating damage they caused.  Vetra only had the energy, the will, to climb into the bed behind her, and hold on to what they had left.     
  
At some point in the night, she felt small fingers touching her face, fingers that then roved blindly down beneath the sheets.  Ryder rolled on top of her, bleary, still blitzed on Doc’s brandy, and babbled something that sounded like “obliterate me with your tongue.”  When Vetra stopped her hands, gingerly, Ryder groaned.   
  
“S’fine. Took the pills,” she mumbled.  Her forehead came to rest on Vetra’s chest, muffling the raspy, “Please,” that came out when Vetra remained quiet and still.   
  
“Not a good idea,” she said, smoothing some of the flyaway tangle on top of Ryder’s head.   
  
“Turn me. . you can turn it off,” Ryder said, but she rolled away to curl up so tight and small that Vetra’s heart clenched.   
  
The rest of the night passed over them, a sleepless turian and a ball of wreckage that twitched and whimpered in a drunken coma.     
  
Turn off the pain by fucking it away.  Well, that was one way to go about it.  She couldn’t force Ryder to sit with Lexi, not yet, so the Doc was out for now.  And if alcohol continued to count as medication _and_ foreplay, then Ryder wasn’t going to get anywhere with Vetra on that front.   
  
Hours crawled by in the dark, with only SAM’s slight blue throb for company.  They’d lost ground, literal ground, but bigger things were falling apart, too.  Beside her, Ryder flinched once, hard, and fell deathly still again.  Until she let out a varren-like snore, Vetra forgot to breathe.   
  
She couldn’t turn it off, no.  But she could turn it into something.   
  
  
For three days, Ryder barely left her room.  She emerged to go to the bathroom, but that was it.  Once during late shift, while most of the crew were sleeping, Suvi claimed she saw Ryder haunting the meeting room in nothing but her tank top and underpants.   
  
Vetra collected crusty half-eaten bowls of cereal and flattened juice packs, brought her fresh linens (which Ryder didn’t use), and generally tried to keep the woman from turning into a space hobo.  What Ryder did do was check her e-mail.  A lot.  Waiting, Vetra figured, on word from the Initiative.   
  
And that wasn’t going to happen on Vetra’s watch.  Not yet.   
  
Exhausted, but driven by the challenge of keeping Ryder sober and away from the airlock, Vetra dropped into the kitchen booth beside PeeBee while Drack prepped lunch.   
  
“I still can’t believe it.  Even the first outpost on Eos hadn’t gone out like that.  A whole place just. . . _phfoof_ .”  PeeBee sipped her third cup of Kallo’s coffee blend.  “So what exactly did she do when you found it like that?”   
  
What people do when The Worst is a thing that already happened. When they’re making history the same old sad and bloody way, one mistake at a time.   
  
Vetra sighed.   
  
“After we killed all the scavengers she turned around and unloaded a whole clip into that Remnant VI you made for her,” she said.  It sounded so. . .factual.  Which it was.  But there’d been more color to it than that at the time.  A context sharpened by Ryder’s own history with letting people down.  Very specific and already dead people.  Vetra stretched her legs, rolling her sore ankles until they popped.  “Then she kicked it, broke her toe, and started sobbing over it about how sorry she was.  For taking it out on a friend.”   
  
At the counter, Drack huffed and kept chopping.  “That sounds about right, as humans go.”     
  
“I can patch up Zap, no problem, if that helps,” offered Peebee.   
  
“I oughtta take her to a blasting range,” Drack said, turning with the knife in hand.  “Or hell, just go out to the biggest Kett deployment we can find and-”   
  
“She’s grieving, Drack.  And grief, as a word, doesn’t even touch what. . .how she reacted.”  It came out harsher than intended.  Protection-mode did that to her.  Drack nodded as Vetra went on, softer, “And she’s been drunk, asleep, or hiding ever since.”   
  
She swiveled to PeeBee.   
  
“But I do need something from you,” Vetra said, talon tapping the table.  “I’m calling in a favor, B’Sayle, so no talk-back on this one.”   
  
To her credit, PeeBee dropped the offended look as soon as it scrunched up on her face.  Vetra was that determined.   
  
Intrigued, PeeBee leaned in.  “If it’ll help Ryder, I’m in.  Whatcha got in mind?”   
  
  
Three more days, seven galactic standard hours, and a lot of hefty promises later, Vetra managed the near-impossible.  She got Ryder dressed, geared up, and back on Kadara.  Her entire, and substantial, reputation had been built on lesser achievements.   
  
By the time they were strolling through the Warden’s gatehouse at Kadara Port, Ryder’s mood was, well, still low, but stable.  Melancholy, with an undercurrent of plastic humor.  Vetra insisted on driving the Nomad.    
  
*******  
  
Apparently it was taking too long to get there.  Behind the wheel, Vetra cursed and grumbled about the time of day and obstacles in the terrain.  Her frantic attitude boggled Ryder.  What the hell difference did it make if they hit the outpost now or in an hour?     
  
Former outpost.     
  
She’d gone at least twenty minutes not thinking about the message, or the lack of response.  Or the smell.  Her empty stomach turned over.   
  
Ryder rubbed her face, nearly jabbing out her own eye when they careened across the road and back again, dodging an acid spit-gob from the squat and scaly welcoming committee.  Vetra apologized.  Ryder gave her a weak smile.   
  
Why the rush?  A smoldering crater was a smoldering crater.  It didn’t look any better by day than at night.   
  
But at the crossroad, the Nomad swerved up, not down the path to nowhere good.   
  
“Where’re we going?”   
  
Vetra’s hands flexed on the wheel.  Her mandibles flared a twinge, but all she said was, “You’ll see.  Just. . .keep an open mind, okay?”   
  
Nerves.  They came off Vetra like invisible wavy stink lines.  Ryder hadn’t seen her like this since Sid’s business.   
  
“Should I have packed grenades?  You’re making me feel like this is a grenade situation.”   
  
“It’s not.  I promise.”   
  
Eventually, their upward climb brought them to a high, flat cliff.  Vetra didn’t wait for Ryder to climb out; After slamming the Nomad to a stop she was out, gone beyond the kicked-up dust cloud.   
  
“Oookay.”  Squinting through the dust, Ryder could make out two shapes around the vicinity of the cliff’s edge.  The tall, pointy figure with the lead foot she knew. The thing she was gesturing at, though. . .   
  
Numb, driven purely by habit, Petra scanned the object and moved closer.  Several things happened at once:  The dust cleared, allowing Ryder to see that the cliff was a scenic overlook, situated above the ruins of Kadara Outpost, the object beside Vetra came into perfect focus, and SAM piped up.   
  
“This is a gnomonic sundial,” SAM announced.  “Early human cultures used them to track time by the apparent position of the sun.”   
  
Vetra stood beside it, misremembering how her arms worked or what to do with them.   
  
“I know what it is,” Ryder mumbled.  Her eyes stung, from sand and unspent tears, and emotional refusal.  She stepped up to the sundial, but didn’t touch it.  “Here in the future we’ve got pretty reliable time-calculating devices.  Portable, even.  No sun required.”   
  
Vetra’s head dropped.  She tried to hide it, but Ryder knew disappointment on any face.     
  
Blurting the first dumb thing was Ryder’s defense, nowhere near as effective as biotic shields and with a far worse sting.  But making light of it wasn’t going to change the beauty of it, any more than it would protect her from the intent.     
  
And the sundial was beautiful.  It reconciled, somehow, the distance between itself and the outpost’s remains, still a sooty, patchwork smudge in the valley below.   
  
Ryder walked around the sundial slowly, running a hand across its gleaming disc.  It sat on a hip-high plinth made of dark, brassy metal.  Its gnomon and outer ring were a pale, silvery blue, polished to a shine that made Ryder wince to look at it.   
  
So she looked at Vetra instead, which pained her in a totally different way.  Vetra’s hand shook a little as she touched the sundial, too.   
  
“They were going to memorialize this place, but I wanted it to be _us_ , our statement on what this was, and should be.  And I didn’t want whatever stood here to look like a grave marker.”  It came flooding out of her like someone had smashed a dam.  Someone had.  Someone who couldn’t love her more if she was literally sugar-coated and shaped like a cartoon hanar.   
  
Ryder choked on her own spit when she finally said, “This is. . .it’s perfect.”   
  
Vetra exhaled and beamed at her.   
  
“It’s, uh, it’s made from the salvage that the Initiative confiscated, after we left,” she said, then added, “Don’t ask how I got it.”   
  
SAM spoke up from her omni-tool, instead of inside her head.  “Per tradition, the sundial appears to be inscripted with a motto.”   
  
Ryder read along the arc of the disc.   
  
OMNES ÆQUALES SOLA VIRTUTE DISCREPANTES.   
  
“You know, I was supposed to learn Latin.  I maintain that six years of elcor was totally worth it.”   
  
Careful, like Ryder was a trip-mine, Vetra slid up alongside her, looped a long arm around Ryder’s waist, and translated.   
  
“It reads, _‘All hours are the same - they are distinguished only by good deeds,’_ ” she said.  It sounded undeniable, dressed in Vetra’s sweet, strong voice.   
  
Ryder’d always had a limited capacity for accepting absolutes.  It made working with archaeologists easy, and things like this, like Vetra, much much harder.  She sniffed, her sinuses suddenly swollen and her eyes growing needles inside.     
  
“I love it.  Thank you.” Ryder let go of the sundial to pull Vetra into a crushing hug, her face smushed between breastplate and a pair of tight, circling arms.  So, her voice went smushy too when she added, “With profound love:  You’re my favorite thing in the world. A giant nerd.”   
  
“I love you, too.”   
  
Ryder pulled away, rubbing her eyes.   
  
“Hey, this is the first gift you’ve ever given me, isn’t it?”   
  
Vetra started to answer, then held her tongue for a beat, making Ryder wonder how she’d secretly benefitted on Vetra’s watch.   
  
“I suppose it is,” she drawled, and crossed her arms. “So where’s my gift, huh?  Seems like you owe me something pretty special.”   
  
“Well, I could return the recycled-retro-art favor, make you an old-timey mailbox from your Blast-Ohs cartons.”   
  
The teasing, loving, all-around warm mood retracted, quick as Vetra’s mandibles, and the reason for this little excursion came charging back in.   
  
She said, “There is something you could do for me.  It’s big, but I think you can manage it,” and turned to her omni-tool.   
  
Ryder shot back, “Drack’s not up for it.  I asked.”   
  
But Vetra ignored her, holding out her display so Ryder could read the message she’d pulled up.   
  
  
      _To: Director Tann_   
    _From: An Abject Failure_  
  
_I resign.  I hereby tenderize my resignation._     
  
  
“Shit.”   
  
Vetra looked her dead in the eye.  So goddamn sincere that Ryder wanted to throw herself into an eezo core rather than deal with it.  “Don’t quit.”   
  
“I think I already did.” Ryder groaned and swiveled to the scenery.  That was safe.  Safe as houses on fire.  She dragged her hands up over her face and through her hair where they stayed, keeping the pressure on.  Like holding her head would keep the rest of her brain from evacuating. “ Tenderize?  Christ.”   
  
“SAM defused this particular bomb before you blew yourself up with it.”  Calmly, with more tenderness than Ryder deserved, Vetra took her arms down and held her hands.  “Asked me for help because you wouldn’t.”   
  
“Thanks, mom-bot,” Ryder muttered at SAM.   
  
“You are welcome, Pathfin-”   
  
“Oh my god, stop pretending you don’t know sarcasm.”   
  
Ryder resisted the pull of Vetra’s arms.  But when her eyes went from steely to soft and worried, Ryder gave in.  All in.  And Vetra’s thumb tracked her cheek where it was sticky with tears.   
  
“If you want to do something for me, it’s this:  Stay.  Put up a fight.  One hour at a time, or one minute at a time.” Her forehead bumped Ryder’s, and she whispered against her skin, making her shiver, “Just don’t quit.”   
  
Not, ‘do this and do it now.’  Just ‘don’t do something you can’t take back.’     
  
Vetra hadn’t ever traded in regret.  It’d been as abstract to her as it was familial to Ryder, until they’d stood in the wreckage of something worth giving a damn about.  And Ryder wouldn’t dump any more regret on Vetra’s door than they could reasonably handle, together.  She owed that much to a whole lot of people.   
  
“Okay,” she finally said, sniffling and stuffy.  “But only because grand gestures require zero wrapping.”   
  
Vetra nodded, satisfied.   
  
“SAM, go ahead and execute the scorched-earth protocol on that message.”   
  
SAM chimed, “Done.”   
  
“Jesus, you couldn’t have called it something else?”   
  
Vetra winced at Ryder. “Sorry about that.”   
  
“No, no.  It’s fine.  Fitting.”   
  
She took Vetra’s elbow.  They stood before the sundial and swayed as a stiff breeze blew through, over the cliff, to blanket the scarred valley with a veil of dust.  The landscape had plenty of energy left, tons to give, a gigantic canvas of aqua and peach and rust.   
  
Vetra nudged her.  “Do you want to head back?”   
  
“Well, according to this we’ve got about ten minutes until the sun sets.”  Ryder reached out to thumb the gnomon, tracing its inky shadow all the way to the hour mark.  “I kinda want to see what that looks like from here.”   
  
  
  
  



End file.
